Stephen Levine

And in the Buddhist tradition, there's a definite encouragement from the Buddha to realize that in this, you know, precious human birth, we have limited opportunities.

Very few of us will know when we've crossed the line, when we will have, as Stephen Levine put it, one year to live.

We don't know.

And I live with the knowing that the lights could go out.

Wow, look at this crazy mind.

You know, o-one, one big shift early on in practice, I think it was Stephen Levine who, who said this, "When you can move from, oh gosh, look at my mind to wow, look at the mind," and you don't take it personally, phew.

And then you can be in on the joke instead of the butt of the joke, the big cosmic joke.

It takes curiosity, and it takes, um, a willingness also to open up to all the good stuff because sometimes we're very familiar with dealing with our suffering, but opening up to the beauty and the goodness of the world, well, I don't know.

He says we're looking for the experience of being alive.

One of my teachers, Stephen Levine, used to say, he called it, he couldn't even use a word, he'd say the experience.

And Campbell went on to say that it's about this resonance that happens that connects my inner experience, the sentience, the subjective experience, the dream, with the world, that they're connected, that they're not these separate things.

ways of being.

Great.

I remember reading a book by Stephen Levine in which he shared a haiku that stopped me in my tracks.

And it was this.

Sipping a cup of tea, I stopped the war.

So just to complete the loop here, I mentioned before, that's where self-compassion comes in.

And one of the things that I suggest whenever we notice that we're dysregulated, whether sympathetically activated or in shutdown and collapse, is to also have a kind or friendly or Stephen Levine used to say, a merciful attitude towards what we're finding.

Because if we go, I'm tired again, crap, what is wrong with me? We're collapsing in, we're piling more dirt and debris on top of us, and we're sinking lower.

if we can meet it with, oh, okay, for whatever reason, my body, my nervous system, my immune system needs me to go here now, right? It's not my fault.

I think there's a lot in death that we learn about living.

And the impermanence of everything, right? And I, you know, everything from the Tibetan book of death and dying to, you know, Stephen Levine, some of these authors who've written great books.

He's a fabulous author.

Yeah.

She started talking not about conscious dying, but just dying itself, making it acceptable to talk about dying.

And at one point, she came to a workshop as a participant that Ram Dass was teaching in Rhode Island, at which Stephen Levine was the Buddhist meditation teacher.

Stephen and Elizabeth really hit it off.

She invited him to continue to come to her workshops and teach meditation, which he did.

The last one was acceptance.

Right.

But when I was teaching with Stephen Levine, and he'd been teaching with Elizabeth a bunch, as I just mentioned, he said what Elizabeth is calling acceptance is really resignation.

It's like, I'm grieving, or we could apply this to dying.